Engineers use load testing to evaluate the performance of a computer program while being exposed to a heavy workload. Load testing is one of the final tests carried out before a software application is shipped to customers. A test engineer may attempt to understand how a human user would interact with the software application and devise a test plan to automate the human interaction therewith. Such automation may be conducted with a software testing tool, such as LoadRunner distributed by Hewlett-Packard.
A test engineer may use load testing software to interact with a computer program and record those interactions in an automated testing script. Such a script may be replayed as many times as needed to evaluate the performance of the program. In addition, multiple instances of these scripts may be executed in parallel to determine how the program reacts under stress. The final script may include functions that trigger objects in the computer program. However, some objects triggered by the functions may be irrelevant to a given test. For example, if the purpose of a test is to evaluate the performance of communications between a client and a server, objects that render a dialog box on the screen may be redundant. Therefore, many load testing applications allow users to manually filter out objects deemed irrelevant such that functions triggering these objects are not included in the script during the recording phase.